This lesson helps to build fluency with drawing a graph. Students use animal pictures to develop their data set by categorizing and recording the totals on a data table. Pictures are used here because it supports the idea that each bar on the bar graph represents a quantity. This work develops students' understanding that data can be represented on a graph and the graph can be used to answer questions.

Students engage in Mathematical Practice 2 (Model quantitatively and abstractly) as they move from the concrete pictorial representation of the data to the abstract representation of the bar graph while developing the understanding that the data is the same.

Key vocabulary:

bar graph

category

data table

Special materials needed:

scissors (optional - students could decide a category for each animal visually)